(courtesy IMP Awards)
Season 2, E 1-5 review
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Catch up! Season 1, E6-10 review
(courtesy official trailer)
It’s a strange thing popping back into a show after long break.
In the case of Poker Face, the break was both not intentional and not because the show didn’t delight the hell out of me; it was simply that life got in the way and with streaming platforms overflowing with new and shiny “Watch me!” moments, getting back to a show after happily watching the first five skillfully-wrought episode, proved all but impossible.
Until now, that is when the arrival of season two and the presence of the irrepressibly clever Natasha Lyonne made me realise that I really need to first the last five episodes of a very fine season and ready myself for the 12 to follow in the newly-arrived season two.
What impresses after such a long break between episode groups – I watched the first five in the top half of 2023 after its release in January that year – is how well the series sustains the central mystery-of-the-week premise without once feeling stale and while juggling an ongoing arc where protagonist Charlie Cale (Lyonne), who has an uncanny ability to tell if someone is bullshitting up a storm, is on the run from some Las Vegas gangster casino operators.
It would be all too easy for the differently-themed episodes, which find Charlie laying low while working for everyone from a skilled but reclusive maker of costumes for monster movies to a drag race track amusement arcade or trying to stop the murderous plans of a pathological Wall Street bro, to feel like it’s the same idea on repeat but Johnson, with the aid of imaginatively clever scripts, performances which bring monstrous people to life while keeping them very flawed and human and a roster of guest stars who more than earn their stay, keeps them fresh and vibrant all the way through.
This is not simply a case of giving Charlie something to do while she evades Cliff LeGrand (Benjamin Bratt) who’s hunting her down on behalf of casino mob moss Sterling Frost Snr (Ron Perlman); these episodes explode how spectacularly evil people can be while pursuing the most base and ordinary of human passions.
If you have ever wondered how much a person could rationalise and justify in the cause of their own self-aggrandisement, then pay close attention to episodes six-through-ten of season one of Poker Face, which shows it is a lot.
A LOT.
One of the co-founders of a special effects company, played by Cherry Jones, will do anything to keep her company viable and hie reputation intact while an actress on the wane (Ellen Barkin in scarily icy form) has no compunction with killing all kinds of people if it keeps her career buoyant and her illicit man by her side.
We like to think of hopes and dreams as good and virtuous things but here they are, twisted and broken and malevolent, a million miles from the dreamy stuff of Disney, and far closer to the hellhole of darkly ordinary humanity which will do some truly awful things to keep a “dream” alive.
Charlie, of course, can spot their deception and deadly rationalisations a mile off, and it helps her not only to bring about some justice, episode-by-episode, in a society scarily absent of it much of the time, but to stay one step ahead of LeGrand and, as it turns out in a final episode which flips the table brilliantly not once but twice, tidying up season one and setting season two up very nicely indeed, to make herself valuable just before she’s back with a target on her back.
Poker Face is deliciously rich and meaningful morality play storytelling that balances arc and episode narratives with aplomb, which gives us a protagonist who’s vulnerably flawed but smart-as-a-whip and gloriously capable, and which knows how to keep things taut and tight and pell-mell fast while also able to stop and let some of that oft-featured humanity to sneak from the shadows into the revelatory light.
Poker Face season 1 streams on Stan in Australia.
Behind the scenes …